stop and think
I read a line in a book today: "I wonder whether I have already met the next person I will sleep with, or whether it will be someone currently unknown to me."Before you get carried away: I wasn't thinking about who I will next sleep with. It just got me wondering about the intricate webs of people I've known in my life and how they fit together; particularly how my relationship with people changes over time.
When I meet someone, I do a bit of compartmentalising. I know it's not very nice, everyone is individual, yada yada, but I do it anyway. People get put into their appropriate categories like "flatmate", "friend", "I know you from uni", "colleague", "someone you must put up with because it's for the good of the nation", "I can't quite remeber your name but I'm sure you trod on my foot once", "nice guy at the cafe", etc.
Once someone has been compartmentalised, I expect them to stay there. Nothing much happens in day-to-day life that would promote someone from "I know you from uni" to "flatmate", "friend" and "you trod on my foot" simultaneously. So when someone does move compartments, it always takes me by surprise. I never realise they've jumped to a new ship until we're having dinner every weekend in between movies and bouts of DDR.
For instance, at my last workplace there were so many people who I knew from uni. At least half the development team came from UTS, so I recognised a lot of faces even if I hadn't met them before (and I was probably more familiar to them because I used to work at the support desk - handing out printouts was really quite a stressful job). So when I started work, everyone was automatically in "I know you from uni" and "colleague" head spaces. I might even have been "that annoying chick from helpdesk" to most of them. But it didn't occur to me that the "uni people" I met years ago would become "colleagues", and some even "close friends". I never thought I'd be sitting alongside them in 3 years' time having coffee with them every day, planning dinners, going ballroom dancing with them, going to their weddings, drinking in pubs together halfway across the world. I still have images of people sitting in labs looking studious and scary. And laughing at a Gantt chart in my IS assignment when Cally and I were merely trying to fill up page quotas...
I guess the point is, I have a healthy dose of respect for all the randomness (or possibly predestined aspect) of fate. I'm intensely curious about the future and how quickly it changes now. Will I be working alongside the coffee guy next week after learning he's secretly a C# guru on sabbatical? Have I met the man who's going to heroically rescue me from some crazy situation in 3 years' time? Am I going to have kids and grow old with a guy who's currently in the "trod on my foot" compartment?
Will neon green make a comeback in 4 years' time? It all really makes you stop and think...
posted by d @ 5:49 pm
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